Mambo (27 page)

Then find somebody else to do it, Ruhr had said.

The idea, once planted, grew in the dark. Ruhr, master gardener, nurtured it, made it sprout. And when it was fully grown and luxuriant in the Duty Officer's mind, Ruhr administered the final flourish one night while he and his new American friend were drinking schnapps at a pub on St Andrew's Hill in the centre of Norwich. Ruhr needed something from the Duty Officer. Something simple really. But classified. Ruhr hinted broadly that in exchange for this small item of information the Duty Officer's life could be “rectified”. He wouldn't ever have to worry about his girlfriend again. Ruhr understood, of course, that the “drastic” solution he was suggesting might be offensive, alien even, to the young man, and if he wanted to refuse Ruhr's offer, well, what difference would it make to their friendship?

Why did Ruhr want the classified information? the Duty Officer asked in the manner of a pharmacist asking a customer why he needed a restricted medicine for which he had no prescription.

Ruhr answered that it was a trifle really, a journalistic matter, an opportunity to photograph a missile in transit from a site, an exclusive. He was convincing in an odd, hypnotic way. He could use a stock shot of the kind supplied by military press liaison offices, but he resented the idea. No, what he wanted was the real thing on a real road surrounded by a real escort. The feel of authenticity – that was important. The way things truly looked, that was what he was after. For a photo-journalist, veracity was what mattered.

He needed a timetable, a calendar of forthcoming events, places and times, routes. In return for these snippets Ruhr would ensure the total security of the young man's marriage and with it his peace of mind. And what was life when you had no serenity? How could one pursue a career distracted by emotional problems that could be clarified in an instant?

That night of beer and schnapps on St Andrew's Hill, everything was neatly slotted in place. Ruhr knew he'd get the kind of information so exclusive it made him indispensable. He knew what the route of the missile was to be; he knew the exact time and place. Information was power, especially when it was information his employers didn't have.

It was a triumph to turn the young American round, and yet easy too, because the Duty Officer was so vulnerable. Murder and treachery. Now it pleased Ruhr to think he'd made this very ordinary young man, who was neither terribly bright nor terribly stupid, an accomplice in both crimes!

Three nights later Ruhr sneaked into the woman's house and stabbed her directly through the heart while she slept. He waited until he heard her die, then he left. By the next evening, Ruhr had the information he wanted. It had taken him exactly twenty-three days to get it. He never saw the Duty Officer again.

Now the truck had finished refuelling the plane. Joseph Sweeney lit a cigarette. He watched the sun, in a great explosion the colour of burgundy, slide towards darkness on the rocky horizon. A chill was already in the air.

“It's time to go,” Sweeney said.

“I am ready,” Ruhr remarked. “As always.”

“We should dump the cab first.”

“Of course.”

The cab of the truck that had conveyed the missile and the launch system was uncoupled from the trailer. It was excess weight on the plane, and useless now. It was detached from the trailer and allowed to roll down the ramp to the airstrip, there to be abandoned.

Havana, Cuba

In the early afternoon, Rafael Rosabal walked on the crowded, humid Calle Obispo in Old Havana. The breeze that blew over the sea wall, the Malecón, faded in the streets in a series of quiet little gasps that would barely shake a shrub. Today everything smelled of salt. Today you could practically
hear
metal corrode as rust devoured it. There was rust everywhere, in the decorative iron grilles of windows and doorways, on the panels and underbodies of the old American automobiles cluttering the streets, even in the paintwork of the new Cuban-built buses and the imported Fiats and Ladas. Where rain had run through rust, coppery stains, suggestive of very old tears, discoloured the façades of buildings.

Rosabal reached the entrance to the Hotel Bristol. He was jostled on all sides by pedestrians who filled the cobbled street. Rectangular posters fluttered twenty feet overhead, advertisements announcing an exhibition of modern Cuban artists at the Casa de Bano de la Catedral. Rosabal loathed Cuban art, which he considered dull and derivative. Socialism, as it was conceived by the Lider Maximo, hadn't altogether electrified creativity.

He went inside the Bristol, passing the registration desk where a clerk was reading a copy of
Granma
, the Party's newspaper. According to the headline, the Lider Maximo was going to make a speech sometime that day on TV.

Rosabal kept walking until he came to the small dark bar at the rear, a narrow room lit by two dim bulbs. He asked for a
mojito
only to be told by an apologetic barman that lemon and lime juice were both temporarily out of stock. He settled for a beer, which he took to a table.

Apart from himself, there was one other customer, a tall, bony man in a dark blue two piece suit. This was Rosabal's contact, Teodoro Diaz-Alonso. The word that always popped into Rosabal's head when he saw Diaz-Alonso was
remilgado
, prim. Diaz-Alonso wore small glasses parked near the tip of his nose. His stiff bearing suggested a professor of the kind you no longer saw in the city. Diaz-Alonso was drinking cola from a tall glass. Rosabal sat down beside him.

Rosabal was a little uneasy whenever he had meetings with Diaz-Alonso in Havana. And yet why shouldn't there be a point of connection between Rosabal's Ministry of Finance and MINFAR, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, for which Diaz-Alonso worked as a senior advisor? Both men were government servants, after all. They knew the same people, went to the same restaurants and parties, enjoyed the same privileges of rank. Besides, Diaz-Alonso was a frequent visitor to Rosabal's apartment in the Vedado. This encounter would look perfectly natural to any casual observer. So why worry about it?

Diaz-Alonso said, “The General has asked me to convey his greetings, Rafael.”

“Thank the General.”

“I am also to give you a message.” Diaz-Alonso paused and looked like a scholar recalling a quotation. “The General says that the conditions you require will be ready.”

Rosabal sat back in his chair and tried to relax. It was extraordinary how, when you were so involved with the architecture of a conspiracy, when one blueprint had obsessed you for so long, you forgot simple pleasures – the taste of a beer, the aroma of a good cigar. It was like living in a room with the shades constantly drawn. Nothing happened beyond the shades, no cars passed in the street, no women strolled on the boulevards, no sun, no moon. The room was everything.

“Tell the General this will not be forgotten,” he said. “Nor will any of the recent services he has provided.”

Diaz-Alonso was expressionless as he remarked, “The General does not underestimate the importance of his role in this whole project, Rafael. He is not a man who favours false modesty. But for himself he expects no monetary rewards, of course. He is no mercenary. The General seeks only the post of Minister of the Armed Forces.”

“That's understood.”

Diaz-Alonso raised his hand very slightly, as if to admonish Rosabal, in the gentlest way, for interrupting him. “The General also expects a certain seniority among Ministers, naturally. First among equals, so to speak.”

Rosabal said, “The General will be accommodated. Assure him of that.” General Alfonso Capablanca, second in command of the Armed Forces to Raul Castro, had always been consistent in what he wanted. Negotiating with the General through his intermediary had been part of the arrangement from the beginning. The General liked the distance. He also thought it observed a certain kind of protocol which even conspirators must obey, lest they become mere anarchists. There was such a thing as form, Capablanca said. If Rosabal was to become one day the President of this nation – with the help of the General and a number of his senior officers, of course – he would understand that form often meant more than substance. Politics, in the final analysis, was not to be confused with the real world. Politics was a matter of appearance.

Rosabal was equal to the General's cynicism. He found Capablanca an extreme bore, but indispensable. Without his inclusion, and the role of his officers, the scheme would fall to pieces. And without the General's ability to acquire the Lider Maximo's signature on a certain document, the plot – if it existed in any form – would have taken a different shape. Therefore Rosabal, out of a gratitude more pragmatic than sincere, met the General's demands, and was very polite even as he looked forward to the day when Capablanca might be “retired” by a firing squad.

Diaz-Alonso inclined his head a little. The gaunt, tight-lipped face yielded very little emotion. “The General will also need to know about any changes in schedule as soon as they occur.”

“I expect none.” Rosabal was thinking of Gunther Ruhr now, and the missile. He looked at his watch. Ruhr would be in North Africa, if all had gone well. And since there was no news to indicate otherwise, Rosabal assumed everything was in order. Anyhow, he would have heard from Caporelli if anything had altered. They usually exchanged messages by telephone. Caporelli called Mexico City, and the message was conveyed to Havana by one of the Italian's employees. Rosabal smiled a little as he thought of the Italian. Caporelli's problem was the way he deemed himself smarter and sharper than anyone else.

Diaz-Alonso said, “These are very strange times for our nation, Rafael. Once upon a time, I remember, we all had high hopes. Very high. Now, everywhere I look I see discontent.” He shrugged and finished his soda. “Change must come. Every day, a little more pressure builds up, and steam always seeks an outlet. I wish there was a legal way of achieving change, but there is no longer any legality in the system. The Party is the only voice. And the Party is a big problem, Rafael. It is governed by men who cannot hear the voices of the people.”

“Not for much longer,” Rosabal said.

“Let us hope so, Rafael.” Diaz-Alonso set his empty glass down on the table. He rose to his feet. “You know how to contact me if you have to.”

Rosabal watched Diaz-Alonso cross the room, then took another sip of his beer. He put on his black sunglasses and prepared to leave. As he passed in front of the bar, the bartender asked, “Did you hear?”

“Hear?”

“On the radio a moment ago. Fidel has cancelled his speech today. They didn't say why. He must be pretty damn sick if he can't make a speech, heh?”

Rosabal, who worked to maintain a low profile in Castro's government because he found anonymity a more useful tool than renown, said nothing. He thought he saw a slight look of recognition cross the barman's face, but then it was gone.

“I heard a story he has ulcers,” the barman remarked. “Maybe they're acting up. I don't remember a time when he ever cancelled.”

Rosabal replied with a platitude and continued walking past the bar and the reception desk and back on to Obispo Street, where the breeze had gathered strength and shook the posters that hung in the air.
The Lider Maximo was too sick to make his speech
. For the first time in history, Rosabal thought.

He walked past the herbal shop, El Herbolario. The scent of mint drifted toward him, evoking an unwelcome memory of Guantanamo and Rosabal's impoverished childhood there.
Hierbabuena
, which so many people found pleasing, had grown in profusion near his home. His father had been a poor, illiterate cane-cutter, his house a miserable hut through which hot winds blew dust and which, in the rainy season, became flooded and filled with mosquitoes. People were said to be better off in Guantanamo these days, but that was a relative thing. Poverty, no matter what the Communist statisticians told you, still existed. The only difference was that increased life expectancy and low infant mortality meant there were many more people around to enjoy it.

Rosabal, thinking how far he had travelled from his wretched origins and how close he was to his goal, paused on the corner. He was rich now, he had access to vast sums of money and investments all over the world and he rarely ever thought about his background. Who needed it anyway? Who needed to recall the lack of nutrition and the mosquitoes that fed on thin bodies and the sheer hopelessness that the land instilled in people? He remembered his emphysematic father cutting cane, cutting cane, on and on, season after monotonous season, stooped and burned black by the harsh sun in the cane-fields, a prisoner of King Sugar. He remembered his mother, dour, thick-hipped from too many births, dead at the age of thirty-five. She had never smiled, never. These memories bored into him, one despised picture after another, until he felt tension rise in his throat and a hammer knocking the inside of his skull.

He remembered the terrible day in 1962, two years after the death of his mother, when his father had tried to seek political asylum at the American naval base in Guantanamo; he recalled clutching his father's hand and being surrounded by Yanquis in khaki uniforms who asked his father tough questions and laughed at some of the answers. Rosabal recalled the fear he'd felt at the strangeness of it all, the alien language, the unfamiliar uniforms. The cowed look in his father's eyes had haunted him ever since. The Americans turned father and son back. They rejected a dying man and his nine-year-old boy. They spoke of immigration quotas and application forms and the need for sponsors, things neither Rosabal nor his father understood.

A day later, as a direct consequence of his attempt to flee Cuba, Felipe Rosabal was taken away by
fidelistas
. He was never seen again. For years, Rafael Rosabal couldn't decide whom he hated more, Castro or the Yanquis.